Art as a tool of social and political denunciation: this is what several artists of the 16and edition of the Festival TransAmériques (FTA), notably Maryse Goudreau, Lars Jan or even Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Vinnie Karetak. Consequences of forced displacements of ancestors, repercussions of political decisions on the river and on belugas, devastating effects of climate change on water… The FTA promises committed shows that seek to make the public react.
“I want to mix them up”, says Maryse Goudreau when she talks about the effect she wants to have on the public with her show The conquest beluga whale. For about ten years now, the artist has been searching the archives concerning this animal, “bearer of memory”. “In addition to research, I really got involved, I did rescues, necropsies, I secured sites where some whales run aground, etc. “, adds M.me Goudreau about his “life project”.
Same scale for Vinnie Karetak and Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, who draw on their personal Aboriginal history for their play Qumma. The artists wish to evoke the forced displacements which marked their ancestors as well as the collective memory. “Every Inuit family has their stories of surviving the extreme effects of colonization. Our family stories shape who we are, consciously and unconsciously. In our show, we talk about how we opened and closed ourselves as Inuit in order for our light, our will, to shine,” explains Ms.me Bathory.
For Lars Jan, it is the environment that has preoccupied him for more than ten years, and it is on this subject that he decided to build his work. Holoscenes. “For several years, I have felt increasingly concerned with floods and the history of water in the 21stand century. It is a collection of articles, very real natural disasters and conversations that formed the basis from which this artistic vision emerged”, he expresses.
Interdisciplinary approaches
Books, performances, plays… Maryse Goudreau has drawn several artistic objects from her research on the beluga. For The conquest of the beluga, the artist was inspired by more than 5,000 texts, taken from the minutes and verbatim of the Legislative Assembly of Canada, to compose her own. “All the phrases have been said at one time or another by a Member of Parliament or a minister in the House of Commons of Canada in the last 150 years,” she explains. This theatrical reading carried by performers from the Gaspé company Théâtre À tour de role is also accompanied by the sounds of marine mammals.
For Mr. Jan too, scientific research was a starting point for creating his work. For several years, he read many studies, but also surrounded himself with climate professionals to enrich his knowledge. Throughout his research, he did several experiments, notably with Cathy Zimmerman, an expert in performance art. “We started in a swimming pool, then, to try, we went to an industrial water container connected to a pump to be able to understand how the system worked,” he recalls. Eight years after a first version in Toronto, it returns this year for the FTA with a giant aquarium which will be installed on the Tranquille esplanade, in the Quartier des spectacles, where four performers will experience daily scenes before being submerged by twelve tons of water. “There are also resources around the work for viewers who want to learn more about the history of water and climate,” adds Jan.
Because the forces are complex, you have to connect some dots to see how these abstract patterns, like industrial pollution or inaction on treaties, are changing, often for the worse, our daily lives.
Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Vinnie Karetak also offer a work in the form of an “experience”. “We call it sculptural theatre, where the action takes place right in the middle of the audience. We involve the public in what happens, in what we do and in the words we say. We immerse them in light, music, texts and our authentic identities to be seen by all,” explains Mr. Bathory. The public will be brought to gravitate around an iceberg, symbol of Nunavut, and rub shoulders with the artists telling their intimate stories.
Need to rebel
“It’s remarkable that some people think it doesn’t affect them personally,” says the creator of Holoscenes about climate issues. According to him, everyone must feel concerned by the environmental issue, even if the latter does not always seem to directly affect our daily lives. “Because the forces are complex, you have to connect some dots to see how these abstract patterns, like industrial pollution or inaction on treaties, are changing, often for the worse, our daily lives,” he says. It is moreover to express these different issues that Mr. Jan continues, even eight years later, his work Holoscenes. “This project continues to be recycled, and so much the better. It gives food for thought to see how little progress has been made on such vital climate-related issues,” he laments.
For Maryse Goudreau, it was revolt that pushed her to go further and create. “In the 1920s, the Quebec government wrongly accused belugas of eating too much cod and salmon in the river. There was then a campaign of war against them, bombs were fired directly into the water, and fishermen were allowed to shoot them. The beluga has been made a scapegoat. It’s awful,” she recalls.
Lars Jan also hopes to have a “visceral impact” on the public, in particular thanks to the fact that Holoscenes be played outdoors, and therefore be accessible to all. “It’s important that the project reach a diverse audience. Because the project has no language, the performance venue is full of conversations. It’s visual, therefore multilingual, and it creates a community that comes together around ideas and the desire to be moved,” he thinks.
For meme Karetak, art is political. It was her grandmother’s story that inspired her to create: “She was indicted in a murder case, but was acquitted. It’s a long and much more complex story that is explained in the show,” she explains. With Qumma, she wants to give a voice to Aboriginal peoples and get the message across to all communities. “I especially want to show people that we have come this far because someone in our past did not want to give up and stayed on,” she continues.
Despite the harshness of the words of his work, Mme Goudreau also seeks to breathe hope into the story of the beluga. “We are gradually seeing that the entry of women into government is changing the perception of animals. For a very long time, everything was mercantile when we talked about the living and then we considered it differently,” she says. In addition, she found, through her research, that “society has evolved”. “I don’t want to create anxiety about the environment and its issues,” she concludes. There is still work to be done, but perceptions have changed, there have been major changes! It gives hope! »
The common point of all these artists is the desire to make people react, to change mentalities. According to them, art is political and can inspire action. “Art is one of the tools,” concludes Mr. Jan. And we have to use all the tools we have to fix what we broke. »